Paul Giamatti’s CHINWAG with Stephen Asma

I love Paul Giamatti and really want to love this podcast. As a fellow podcaster with over 500 episodes under my belt, I’ve learned a great deal about conducting interviews over the years. Unfortunately, Giamatti makes countless amateur errors as an interviewer. At times he responds with so many “mm hmmm’s” “uh huh’s”, “yeah, yeah’s”, etc that it becomes distracting and overbearing. He also interrupts his guests far too many times, often using the terrible conversational strategy of saying the same word or phrase over and over again until the guest finally gives up trying to finish their thought and acquiesces to his interruption. He apparently feels so strongly that his comment is so crucial that he cuts off his guest in order to have his say. As I said, I so much want to love this podcast, but Giamatti’s conversational style is just too much to bear. Hosts need to give their guests the floor, not constantly interject and cut them off at every turn. Giamatti is a consummate actor, but he has a long way to go as an interviewer.

I barely listen to podcasts, there’s so many! Who has the time? But I always make time for the chinwag! Paul and Stephen discuss everything and anything I’ve ever been interested in from my youth to today! Wag on!

Loved Paul’s narration of HP Lovecraft story. I’ll listen to anything he narrates and now am excited to delve into the author some more. Thank you for these entertaining episodes!

Professor Asma’s classes were my favorite part of college. I’m often jealous of my 17/18 year old self who got to spend a few hours a week just learning fascinating things and exploring weird ideas. Gosh I’m glad to have stumbled upon this podcast! Chinwag has injected some of that esoteric magic back into my week- and is way cheaper than grad school would be! (Also, now I can finally prove to friends that, no, really, these philosophy classes I took in art school were freaking amazing.)